Sisters in Spirit: Iroquois Influence on Early Feminists

by Sally Roesch Wagner

  For twenty years I had immersed myself in the writings of early United States women’s-rights activists Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826- 1898) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), yet I could not fathom how they dared to dream their revolutionary dream. Living under the ideological hegemony of nineteenth-century United States, these women had no say in government, religion, economics, or social life. Whatever made them think that human harmony, respect for women’s lives, and equal rights for women were achievable? Surely these white women, living under conditions they likened to slavery, did not receive their vision in a vacuum.

  Certainly there was a European foundation for American feminism. Gage, regarded as “one of the most logical, fearless, and scientific writers of her day,” maintained that European women, along with their male supporters, had waged a four-hundred-year struggle for woman’s rights.1 She asserted this past came to the forefront during the American Revolution:When the American colonies began their resistance to English tyranny, the women—all this inherited tendency to freedom surging in their veins—were as active, earnest, determined and self-sacrificing as the men...2

  These active revolutionary women saw the struggle as one that could extend the principles of democracy to all groups—including slaves and women. Gage noted that Mercy Otis Warren, Abigail Smith Adams, and Hannah Lee Corbin all “manifested deep political insight” about women’s rights. During the formation of the government, Abigail Adams advised her husband John to “be more generous and favorable to [women] than your ancestors.” She cautioned, “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands,” or, Abigail Adams warned, “we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.” 3 “Thus did the Revolutionary Mothers urge the recognition of equal rights when the Government was in the process of formation,” Gage observed.4

  The forefathers looked with disdain on anything British as they formed their new government—until it came to forcing women into their place. Then the men looked to England for their model. The European tradition of church and law placed women in the role of property, British historian Herbert Spencer maintained. “Our laws are based on the all-sufficiency of man’s rights, and society exists today for woman only in so far as she is in the keeping of some man,” Gage quoted Spencer.5

  Abigail Adams feared—accurately, it turned out—that English common law, (having been recently codified by Blackstone), would provide the basis for family law as the states solidified their laws after the revolution. It marked a decided set-back for women. Woman’s “very being or legal existence was upended during marriage, or at least, incorporated or consolidated into that of the husband, under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs everything,” Blackstone had written. “The two shall become one and the one is the man,” the church proclaimed in canon law, and common law echoed the proclamation. Abigail Adams maintained that marriage under common law robbed woman of her rights and created conditions that encouraged men to act tyrannically.

  At least one founding father joined the Revolutionary-era feminists. Tom Paine penned what was probably the first plea for equal rights published in the United States. Influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft, British women’s rights advocate and author of the 1792 feminist classic, Vindication of the Rights of Women, Paine boldly began his 1775 essay in the Pennsylvania Magazine with the assertion that man is the oppressor of woman.6

  Calls for women’s rights during the Revolution, however, were ignored. Once they had cemented power, the United States revolutionaries placed women in a position of political subordination more severe even than that of the colonial period.7

  Under the European-inspired laws adopted by each state after the revolution, a single woman might own property, earn a living, and be economically independent but, upon uttering the marriage vows, she lost control of her property and her earnings. She also gave away all rights to the children she would bear. Offspring became the “property” of the father who could give them away or grant custody to someone other than the mother, in the event of his death. With the words “I do,” a woman literally gave up her identity. Legally, the woman lost her name, any right to control her own body, and to live where she might choose. A married woman could not make any contracts, sue, or be sued; she was considered dead in the law. Wife-beating was not against the law; neither was marital rape.

  Women’s rights

  The concept of women’s rights could not be easily incorporated into Euro-Christian tradition. Rather, feminism challenged the very foundation of Western institutions, Gage beHeved—especially that of religion. 8

  As I look backward through history I see the church everywhere stepping upon advancing civilization, hurling woman from the plane of “natural rights” where the fact of her humanity had placed her, and through itself, and its control over the state, in the doctrine of “revealed rights” everywhere teaching an inferiority of sex; a created subordination of woman to man; making her very existence a sin; holding her accountable to a diverse code of morals from man; declaring her possessed of fewer rights in church and in state; her very entrance into heaven made dependent upon some man to come as mediator between her and the Savior it has preached, thus crushing her personal, intellectual, and spiritual freedom.9

  “No rebellion has been of like importance with that of Woman against the tyranny of Church and State”

  Matilda Joslyn Gage

  Discontent came to a head for radical women’s rights reformers when they realized in the late 1880s that their hard labor of forty years had not resulted in woman’s equality in the church, state, work place, or family. The United States Supreme Court had ruled that the right to vote was not guaranteed to them. Still seen as the source of evil by the church because of Eve’s original sin, women continued to be, as Gage called them, the “great unpaid laborers of the world,” the virtual slave of the household and, in the few occupations open to them, paid only half the wages men received.

  Reformers who had spent their whole lives working unsuccessfully to change woman’s condition began to realize the depth of the roots of oppression. Certainly they must have had doubts. Could women’s position be natural or “God-ordained,” as the enemies of freedom constantly told them? Both Stanton and Gage’s vision became deeper and broader as their successes failed to materialize.

  Gage expressed it this way:During the ages, no rebellion has been of like importance with that of Woman against the tyranny of Church and State; none has had its far-reaching effects. We note its beginning; its progress will overthrow every existing form of these institutions; its end will be a regenerated world.10

  How were these women able to see from point A, where they lived—corseted and ornamental non-persons in the eyes of the law—to point C, the “regenerated world” Gage predicted, in which all repressive institutions would be destroyed? What was point B in their lives, the real and visible alternative that drove their feminist spirit—not a Utopian pipe dream but a living example of equality?

  Corseted and ornamental non-persons in the eyes of the law.

  Then it dawned on me. I had been skimming over the source of their vision without even noticing it. My own stunningly deep-seated presumption of white supremacy had kept me from recognizing what these prototypical feminists kept insisting in their writings. They believed women’s liberation was possible because they knew liberated women, women who possessed rights beyond their wildest imagination: Haudenosaunee women.

  Gage and Stanton, major theorists of the woman suffrage movement’s radical wing, became increasingly disenchanted with the inability and unwillingness of Western institutions to change and embrace the liberty of not just women, but all disfranchised groups. They looked elsewhere for their vision of the “regenerated world” and they found it—in upstate New York. They became students of the Haudenosaunee and found a cosmological world view they believed to be superior to the patriarchal, white-male-dominated view prevalent in thei
r own nation.

  Once I understood the connection, I came to realize it was everywhere—right where I hadn’t seen it before. The more evidence I uncovered of this indelible Native influence on the vision of early United States feminists, the more certain I became that, previously, I had been dead wrong. Like most historians do, I had assumed that the story of feminism began with the “discovery” of America by white men, or the political revolution staged by the colonists—that there was no seed of feminism already in American soil when the first white settlers arrived. Without realizing it, I had assumed that white people had imported the germ of the idea of woman’s rights and that was the end of the story. My eyes and ears, I realized, certainly needed the clearing Ray Fadden advised in his “Fourteen Strings of Purple Wampum to Writers about Indians.”

  A Vision of Everyday Justice

  The European invasion of America resulted in genocide. That is the most important story of contact. But it is not the only one. While Europeans concentrated on “Christianizing and civilizing,” relocating and slaughtering Indians, they also signed treaties, coexisted with and learned from them. Regular trade, cultural sharing, even friendship between Native Americans and EuroAmericans transformed the immigrants. Perhaps nowhere was this social interaction more evident than in the towns and villages in upstate New York where Matilda Joslyn Gage lived, Elizabeth Cady Stanton grew up, and Lucretia Mott visited. All three of these leading suffragists knew Haudenosaunee women, citizens of the Six Nations Confederacy that had established peace among themselves long before Columbus arrived at this “old” world.

  Stanton, for instance, sometimes sat across from Oneida women at the dinner table in Peterboro, New York, during frequent visits to her cousin, the radical social activist Gerrit Smith.11 Smith’s daughter (also named Elizabeth) was among the first to shed the twenty pounds of clothing that fashion dictated should hang from any fashionable woman’s waist, usually dangerously deformed from corseting. The reform costume Elizabeth Smith adopted (named the “Bloomer” after the newspaper editor who popularized it) promised the health and comfort of the loose-fitting tunic and leggings worn by Native American friends of the two Elizabeths.

  Bloomers on an American woman. Carolyn Mountpleasant, a Seneca woman, in traditional dress.

  In 1853 Gage worked on a committee headed by New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley to document the woefully few jobs open to white women.12 Meanwhile she knew nearby Onondaga women who farmed corn, beans, and squash—nutritionally balanced and ecologically near-perfect crops called “the Three Sisters” by the Haudenosaunee.13

  Lucretia Mott and her husband, James, were members of the Indian Committee of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends. From the 1790s on, these Quakers sent missionaries among the Seneca, educating them and supporting them against unscrupulous land speculators. During the summer of 1848 the Motts visited Cattaraugus where they witnessed women exercising equal authority in discussion and decision-making while the Seneca nation changed its governmental structure. Lucretia watched as the Native women planned the strawberry ceremony in a most non-Christian tradition of women’s spiritual leadership. With her feminist vision fired by her first-hand experience of women’s political, spiritual, social, and economic authority, Mott traveled from the Seneca nation to nearby Seneca Falls, where she and Stanton called the world’s first woman’s rights convention in July.

  Lucretia Mott’s feminist vision was fired by her first-hand experience of women’s political, spiritual, social and economic authority, in the Seneca community.

  These suffragists regularly read newspaper accounts of everyday Iroquois activities: a condolence ceremony to mourn a chief’s death and to set in place a new one; the sports scores when the Onondaga faced the Mohawks at lacrosse; a Quaker council called to ask Seneca women to leave their fields and work in the home (as the Friends said God commanded but as Mott opposed). Newspaper readers in New York also read interviews with white teachers who worked at various Indian nations testifying to the wonderful sense of freedom and safety they felt, since Indian men did not rape women. These front-page stories admonished big-city dandies to learn a thing or two from Native men’s example, so that white women too could walk around any time of the day or night without fear. Rev. M. F. Trippe, long a missionary on the Tonawanda, Cattaraugus and Alleghany reservations, told a New York City reporter: Tell the readers of the Herald that ... they have a sincere respect for women—their own women as well as those of the whites. I have seen young white women going unprotected about parts of the reservations in search of botanical specimens best found there and Indian men helping them. Where else in the land can a girl be safe from insult from rude men whom she does not know? 14

  In the United States, until women’s rights advocates began the painstaking task of changing state laws, a husband had the legal right to batter his wife. A North Carolina court ruled in 1864 that the State had no business meddling in wife battering cases unless “permanent injury or excessive violence” was involved. The batterer and his victim should be left alone, the court determined, “as the best mode of inducing them to make the matter up and live together as a man and wife should.”15 Suffragists knew that wife battering was not universal, living as neighbors to men of other nations whose religious, legal, social, and economic concept of women made such behavior unthinkable. To Stanton, Gage, Mott, and their feminist contemporaries, the Native American principles of everyday decency, nonviolence, and gender justice must have seemed the Promised Land.

  A Vision of Power and Security

  As a feminist historian, I did not at first pay attention to such references to American Indian life because, without realizing it, I accepted the stereotype that Native American women were poor, downtrodden “beasts of burden” (as they were often called in the nineteenth century). I read right past the suffragists’ documentation of Native women’s superior rights without seeing it.

  I remembered that in the early 1970s, some feminists flirted with the idea of prehistoric matriarchies on which to pin women’s egalitarian hopes. Anthropologists soon set us straight about such nonsense. The evidence just wasn’t there, they said. But Paula Gunn Allen, a Laguna Pueblo/Sioux author and scholar, believed otherwise:

  Beliefs, attitudes and laws such as [the Iroquois Confederation] became part of the vision of American feminists and of other human liberation movements around the world. Yet feminists too often believe that no one has ever experienced the kind of society that empowered women and made that empowerment the basis of its rules and civilization. The price the feminist community must pay because it is not aware of the recent presence of gynarchial societies on this continent is unnecessary confusion, division, and much lost time.16

  Allen’s words opened my eyes, threw into question much of what I thought I knew about the nineteenth-century woman’s movement, and sent me on an entirely new course of historical discovery. The results shook the foundation of the feminist theory I had been teaching for almost twenty years.

  A National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship allowed me to replicate the suffragists’ research, and I tracked down Stanton’s and Gage’s citations, poring over books, newspapers, and journals they had read. I visited Onondaga and slowly began to know some of the women.

  I sat in the kitchen of Alice Papineau—De-wa-senta—an Onondaga clan mother, on a hot summer day, drinking iced tea as she described the criteria clan mothers use to choose—and depose, if necessary—the male sachem who represents their clan in the Grand Council, a responsibility of which Stanton and Gage were well aware. But neither suffragist had explained the sachem job requirements, which De-wa-senta listed: “First, they cannot have committed a theft. Second, they cannot have committed a murder. Third, they cannot have abused a woman.” And the overriding qualification: the chief needs to have shown that he can take care of a family, behave as a responsible family man, since he will be responsible for the well-being of the larger families of the clan, the nation and
the confederacy—through seven generations.

  There goes Congress! I think to myself, followed by a flight of fantasy: What if, in the United States, only women chose governmental representatives, and women alone had the right “to knock the horns off the head,” as Stanton marveled—to oust officials if they failed to represent the needs of the people unto the seventh generation?

  If I am so inspired by De-wa-senta’s words today, imagine how the founding feminists felt as they beheld the Haudenosaunee world.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton was called a heretic for advocating divorce laws that would allow women to leave loveless and violent marriages. “What God hath joined together let no man put asunder,” traditional Christianity intoned! She found a model in Haudenosaunee attitudes toward divorce. Stanton informed the National Council of Women in an 1891 speech, a misbehaving Iroquois husband “might at any time be ordered to pick up his blanket and budge.”17 What must it have meant to Stanton to know of such real-life domestic authority?